Fast Track. Q&A.

In his 20 years in journalism, Roger Rosenblatt has...

In his 20 years in journalism, Roger Rosenblatt has written nearly 1,000 stories on various subjects. The best are collected in "The Man in the Water" (Random House).

Q: Who is the man in the water?

A: A central figure in the Air Florida plane crash in 1982 in Washington, D.C.-one of the passengers who, when the helicopter rescue team handed out life preservers to him, kept handing them to someone else. By the time the rescuers came with the last one for him, he had gone under. His sacrifice was so admirable he became the focal point of the story, more so than the crash itself. I named the book after him because I think his act is an example of the basically mysterious things that people are capable of. It's the things you don't understand that attracted me to journalism in the first place.

Q: What was the process like of selecting the essays?

A: It was the most humiliating experience in the world. Not only because it makes you realize how much junk you produce, but because you'd rather be reading someone else.

Q: You have some strange rules for journalism, such as "Betray your sources." What do you mean?

A: What I mean is not divulging privileged information but something far worse: convincing everyone we interview that we're on their side, that we sympathize with them, in order to make them be themselves, because that's when they're most interesting.

Q: Have there been times when it was difficult to "betray your sources?"

A: Once-when I was writing about children of war and I wanted them to talk about incidents that they didn't want to unearth because they were so dreadful. But I knew that without their talking, the piece would have no value for other people, so I gulped, and I did it. And then, more recently, when I interviewed Philip Morris executives. These are very nice people, and I encouraged them to say things that I knew would, in a colder light, make their work look reprehensible.

Q: What do you mean when you say to journalists: "Do not understand it."

A: We may think we do, but we don't really understand most of what we deal with, and we should accept that.